this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
235 points (95.4% liked)
Fediverse
29886 readers
1348 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.
And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it's all DNS's fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.
Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.
Well, Postel has been dead since 1998 and Mills since 2010, so I don't think they're included in people still in control. So they've got that going for them, which is nice, I guess.
Architects of the internet, they said.
If they said the people currently in charge of the internet are an uneasy alliance of shadowy goons and idiots, afraid to openly break anything too irrevocably but occasionally trying to yank on the wires to see if there isn't some way a little more money inside them somewhere, I would generally agree.